LISW: One container ship = 46M cars' emissions

During the UK-China Maritime Services Exchange forum held as part of LISW, Arrow Shipbroking’s head of research Burak Cetinok presented a startling graphic.

In a presentation titled: ’Sulphur cap and beyond: the need for collaboration in addressing the climate change challenge in shipping’, Mr Centinok noted that IMO 2020 is possibly a larger structural change than the phase out of the single-hulled tanker.

“That [process] only applied to the tanker sector and was spread over many years. This time every sector [in the maritime industry] will be involved,” he told the audience.

“Road-going traffic emissions in the EU was another [similarly] monumental challenge and, in that case, it took over a decade to fully implement the clean air regulation and even then, some countries were allowed to delay due to a lack of compliant fuels,” he said.

“Shipping has only been preparing for these sorts of changes for 21 months,” Mr Cetinok told the audience, and he noted that with only a few months to go, there is no clear picture on what will happen.

“One thing is certain,” he said, “shipping is a major contributor to climate change.”

Mr Centinok quoted a study that showed a single container ship that burns around 80 tonnes per day of high sulphur fuel oil (3.5%) emits 3,500 times more sulphur than a standard automotive diesel, equivalent to 46M light duty cars running on Euro diesel.

“That’s a mind-boggling statistic, so I wanted to show how much space that many cars would occupy,” he said. There are various estimates of the equivalent number of cars to produce the same level of sulphur. The smallest estimate he found was equivalent to 19M cars, the smaller red box on the graphic below. The largest is 46M cars, which would actually cover the whole map.